“It’s nice to wear something clean.”
“Come on through and sit down,” she said, heading back up the corridor towards the hallway.
The dining room was down another corridor, in another wing. As they walked through the house, Adam caught sight of other people in other rooms. “How many people live here?”
“A dozen in the house, seventy on the estate. There are a couple of farms a mile or so from here that we’ve sort of been responsible for since The Sisters. About two hundred people.”
Adam suspected the number was a lot higher than that. “Your family was here, even before The Sisters?”
“Oh yes. We’ve been here for two hundred years. We have a certain stake in the area.” She smiled brightly at him. “Where are you from, by the way?”
“Guz. Born and bred.”
“I’ve always wondered. Why do you call it that?”
He shrugged. “It’s an old nickname for the naval base. Why?”
“I’m interested in the way society’s starting to come back together. Here.” She showed him into the dining room, a long, narrow wood-panelled room with a big table set for three. “Sit down. Anywhere’ll do.”
Adam sat. “Is society starting to come back together?”
“Here and there.” Betty sat opposite him and leaned her elbows on the table. “I think Plymouth – sorry, I can’t call it ‘Guz,’ it sounds ridiculous – may actually be the capital of the country. If we had a country to have a capital of.”
“We don’t want to be,” he said. “I don’t think.”
“You might not have a choice.”
He thought about the last time he’d sat in a dining room, in Margate. “I don’t know what the Committee’s planning. If they’re planning anything.”
“Of course not. But if I was your Committee, I’d be thinking very hard about stuff.”
“Oh, they do that all right.”
Andrew came in pushing a small trolley and started to serve dinner before sitting down at the third place setting. Betty poured wine for them. “My great-grandparents kept a pretty good cellar,” she said. “Most of it’s ruined now, but this isn’t too bad. Or we have beer, if you’d prefer.”
He tried the wine. “No, this is good, thank you.”
Dinner was individual steak and kidney pies, roast potatoes, a mixture of vegetables. “I thought we were having chicken,” Adam said, trying a bit of pie.
Betty chuckled. “A little joke. Margaret sent me a couple of layers; we’re always losing hens to foxes or dogs.”
“This is very good,” he told Andrew.
“I don’t get the chance to cook with steak very often,” the younger man said. “The farms round here tend to raise pigs.”
“A pig’s very economical,” Betty said. “Turns rubbish into meat. Your cow’s a bit more labour-intensive. There are a few dairy farms around here, but they tend not to slaughter their stock until they absolutely have to.”
It occurred to Adam that he was being given a lot more information about Blandings and its environs than he strictly needed. But the food was very good.
When they’d finished, Andrew cleared away the plates and took them into the kitchen. Adam said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but ‘Blandings’?”
Betty sat back and beamed at him. “Why, Mr Hardy,” she said. “I do believe you can read. And in fact have read.”
He shrugged.
“I think you’re the first person who’s come here and appreciated the reference,” she said. “My great-great grandfather was a big fan of Wodehouse, apparently. He renamed the house. It used to be called The Limes, although god knows why; there aren’t any lime trees around here.” She got up from the table and said, “Come on; let me show you something. You can bring your wine, if you want.”
He picked up his glass and followed her back along the corridor to the entry hall, then through another door and down a long flight of stairs that ended in a small square brick-lined room with doors on three sides. Betty opened one and stepped through, Adam right behind her. There was a click, and all of a sudden the room was filled with light.
“Oh my word,” said Adam. The room was full of guns.
“You can look, but don’t touch,” Betty said with a smile. “Oh, go on. You can touch too.”
He walked out into the room, looking at the racks of shotguns and hunting rifles and pistols and assault weapons and machine guns. Propped up against the wall were several old RPG launchers, alongside boxes and boxes of ammunition.
“Where did you get all this?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Here and there. Police stations, mostly. Army camps. We traded for some of them. Others, we made.”
He glanced at her.
“We had some original RPG rounds,” she went on, “but we had to get rid of them. They were unstable; too old. We’ve been making new ones, but it’s slow going. Andrew wants to try knocking together a flamethrower, but fuel’s scarce.” She smiled at him.
“How would you feel about moving to Guz?” he asked.
Betty burst out laughing. “Oh, we’re happy where we are, thank you. I couldn’t live in a place called Guz, anyway.”
He took a last look around the room. “Let me introduce you to Gussie.”
HE WENT UP to his room, collected the nylon carrying case, and brought it down to the study, where Betty was rummaging in the hearth with a poker.
“I shouldn’t have done this,” he told her. “It was stupid.”
“We’re all of us victims of strong passions, from time to time,” she said, hanging up the poker and sitting in the armchair.
He took the rifle out of its case. It was almost six feet long and someone had carved the word GUSSIE into the stock.
“That’s very nice,” said Betty. “Heavily modified. Looks like it started out as an H&K PSG1. In good condition, too.” She slipped the gun’s scope out of its pocket in the side of the case and turned it over in her hands. “Hensoldt ZF 6x40. Nice optics.” She put the scope down on the table. “We should have some ammunition for this, you know. It takes 6.72 NATO but a lot of specialist police firearms teams used them so there’s still ammo lying around, if you know where to look.”
“I wasn’t really planning on firing it at anyone,” Adam said.
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “No, it’s more important as a template, isn’t it.” She sat back. “I’d have thought your people would have all the weapons they could cope with, though.”
In the very early days, there had been some discussion about firing up the turbines of one of the three Type 45 destroyers which had been caught in Devonport by the disaster. Adam wasn’t entirely certain what the purpose of this would have been, but as it turned out it never happened, and the old warships had become the core around which civilisation had started to rebuild itself in the West in the following years. They were never going to go anywhere now, and their guided missiles were useless, but they – and the surrounding naval base – had impressive stockpiles of supplies and weaponry.
“We don’t have anything like this,” Adam said. “I don’t know why.” Frank had said Gussie could hit a rabbit in the eye from more than a mile away.
“But what you do have is armourers who could copy it,” Betty said, nodding. “Although you didn’t walk across the country just to steal a gun, did you?”
Adam looked at her. He said, “We lost someone.”
Betty raised an eyebrow, and Adam sighed.
“You needn’t be embarrassed,” she told him, getting up and going over to a cupboard in a corner of the study. “Spying’s been a noble occupation in this country all the way back to Walsingham.” She opened the cupboard, took out a bottle and two glasses, closed the door, and came back to the fireside. “Single malt,” she said, putting the bottle on the table beside the rifle. “A hundred and fifty years old.”
Adam looked at the bottle. “There isn’t much left.”
She shrugged and poured them each a measure.
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“There are some people in Kent,” Adam told her, taking his glass from her. “Thank you. We’ve been hearing about them for years now, but just recently we’ve started to wonder if they might be a problem.”
Betty nodded. “I’ve heard of them too. So you sent someone to take a look?”
Adam sipped his whisky. “When we didn’t hear from her, someone had to go and see what was going on.”
“Did you find her?”
Adam looked at his glass.
“I’m sorry.” Betty took a drink. “Just how dangerous are these people in Kent?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Think of it as intelligence sharing. One day we may have a common enemy.”
“How organised are people round here?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Not very. Just farmsteads. Most of the trading that goes on is informal, there’s no real governmental structure. Hardly anyone can read. We get by all right.”
“If Frank decides to move west, he’ll walk right over you as if you weren’t here.”
Betty looked into the fire, thinking. “He might get a surprise,” she said finally. “A lot of the farms round here were settled by old-style Preppers. Survivalists. They were better-prepared than most people when The Sisters came, although I suppose even they were expecting some sort of warning that the world was going to end. Some of our farmers are pretty hard-nosed.”
“Frank’s got an army,” he told her. “They’re well-armed and they’re well-organised and they’re shit-scared of him. One day the whole South’s going to belong to him or his kids.”
“So why doesn’t he just take over?”
“The Nassingtons,” he said. “On the High Weald. They’re not much better than Frank, but at least they’re content with their lot for the moment. If he wants to go anywhere, he’ll have to go through them, and they won’t be a pushover.” He sipped more whisky.
“It would be good,” Betty mused, “if Mr Frank and the Nassingtons cancelled each other out.”
“Frank’s waiting until he’s strong enough, or he can talk enough of the Wealders into coming over to him.” Adam leaned back in the chair, suddenly aware of just how utterly weary he was. It would be very nice, he thought, if he could just stay here for the rest of his life.
Betty looked at Gussie. “And this belongs to...?”
“Frank. It’s Frank’s gun. And before him it was his dad’s. And before him it was his grandad’s.”
“A family heirloom, then.”
“He showed it me one night. He’d just... well, never mind. He was like a little kid, so proud of his fucking gun. I could have broken his neck there and then.”
“But instead you decided on something more subtle.”
He grunted. “Subtle. I fucked everything up.”
“As I said, strong passions.”
It had been more than that. It had been a strong urge to hurt Frank, to ridicule him, to make him look a fool in front of his own people. He shook his head. “Stupid.”
She smiled at him. “Well, since you’re here, would you mind if we took a look at Gussie? A sniper rifle might come in handy.”
“You don’t have one of your own?”
She chuckled. “Custom work is always interesting; it might help us improve our own weapons.”
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” She put the sniperscope down on the table and sat back in her chair. “We still don’t know how many people there are in the country, you know,” she said. “First there were The Sisters, then the Long Autumn. Famine, disease; my great grandparents’ generation barely had time to have children; they were too busy just trying not to die.”
Adam sipped his whisky.
“You and me and Andrew are the only people who can read, pretty much, within a radius of about twenty miles. That first generation after The Sisters...”
“Too busy trying not to die,” he finished.
She nodded. “And when their children started to have children, there was hardly anyone around who could teach them to read. We’ve lost a lot of things. Oh, stuff gets handed down from generation to generation, hands-on stuff, but there are whole libraries of technical information still in the cities and we can’t use them, by and large.”
“This is what you meant about being an oasis.”
She raised her glass to him. “My great-grandparents realised that if anyone survived the Long Autumn, there had to be something afterwards, otherwise there was no point in surviving at all. Times were very hard round here, as I said, but we’ve started teaching some of the locals to read and write. We’re thinking of opening a school next year.”
“Am I being softened up for something?”
Betty beamed at him. “Bless you,” she said, “you’re not nearly as dim as you look, are you?”
“I’ve come a long way.”
“Yes, you said.” She looked at her glass, looked at the inch or so of whisky still in the bottle, then reached out and topped up both their glasses. “There was a chap named Billy Morton; he’s a bit of a legend round here. He’s gone now, and so are his family, but once upon a time they lived like kings. They arrived in Wycombe just after The Sisters and they found a Tesco superstore, just abandoned. Packed with goods. So they fortified it, fought off other people who wanted the stuff in there. That store kept them supplied for years. Canned and bottled food, water, medicines, clothes.” She looked at her glass again and smiled nostalgically. “Booze.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were parasites and they killed their host. They ran out of stuff. One day that Tesco was just a big empty building, and then the Mortons weren’t special any more and they upped sticks and moved out, probably looking for another store to colonise.”
“And the punchline is...?”
She gave him a long, steady look. “Maybe you are as dim as you look, now I think about it.”
“Everyone comes to that conclusion, sooner or later.”
“We need to organise, or in another fifty years or so we’ll be back to feudalism. We can’t keep leeching on the past. Those boots you were wearing when you arrived, I’m willing to bet they’re almost a hundred years old. Probably came out of stores at Devonport. Am I right?”
“They were a present.”
She waved it away. “We can’t make boots like that now, because those boots were made by machines and nobody knows how to make the machines that made them. We’re living on the carcass of a dead civilisation; the only reason we haven’t run out of stuff yet is because there aren’t enough of us and there’s still plenty to go around. But it will run out.” She nodded at his feet, at the moment clad in a rather fetching pair of slippers. “No more boots.”
There were probably people in Guz who could knock together a machine that made boots, he thought, if they put their minds to it. “It’s not our responsibility,” he said. “We just want to be left alone.”
“But you just walked a very long way to check out what’s going on in Kent.”
“We’re not stupid.”
“No,” she agreed. “No, you’re certainly not.”
“And you really ought to be saying this to the Commodore and the Committee, not to me.”
She grinned. “Oh, without a doubt. But you’re here and they’re not.”
He sighed and curled up in the armchair, tucked his feet under him, closed his eyes.
“How bad was it?” she asked. “Margate?”
“Pretty awful.”
There was a long silence. He opened his eyes. Betty was sitting staring into the fire, holding her glass against her cheek, lost in thought. She looked at him and her expression brightened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must be exhausted and all I’m doing is interrogating you.”
“To be honest, after that dinner I’m happy to tell you everything I know.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes I forget how hard things are everywhere else.”
“I find that hard to believe, somehow.”
Bett
y looked across the room to the curtained windows. “This is a good place, you know. It’s not Plymouth, but we get by. There’s a lot of possibility here now. I’d hate anything to threaten that.” She smiled at him. “Go to bed, Mr Hardy.”
LATER – MUCH MUCH later – it occurred to Adam that Betty actually waited several days before making her suggestion. Eventually, he came to admire that, in a grudging sort of way, but it took him a long time.
He was having breakfast in the kitchen one morning – bacon, fried egg, sausage, fried potatoes – and vaguely wondering whether all this luxury was going to make him soft when Betty came in and sat down across the table from him.
“So,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“It’s brilliant,” he said, indicating his plate. “Thanks.”
“You know,” she said, “it’ll take Andrew another week or so to work on the rifle.”
Andrew had dismantled Gussie and was examining it in minute detail in a workshop easily as well-equipped as anything in Guz. “Yes, we had a chat about that yesterday.”
“And another week or so for your people to turn up.”
“That’s my understanding, yes.” During their most recent contact, Chrissie had been vague about exactly when someone would reach him. It was already more than a month since he left Margate; he would, he thought, have been better off just hiding out in Reculver until a boat could reach him after all.
“How do you feel about making yourself useful?”
Adam put his knife and fork down and looked at her. “I am making myself useful.” He’d spent the previous day mucking out the stables, the day before that helping to mount new blades on one of the estate’s wind generators.
“I need someone to pop over and see some friends of mine, and I can’t spare anybody.”
He sat back and crossed his arms.
“They live a couple of days’ ride from here. There’s been some kind of accident and they need antibiotics.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“No, we don’t make them here,” she told him. “And no, I’m not going to tell you where they come from.”
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